Semantic SEO is a strategic approach that focuses on understanding the contextual meaning behind search queries, rather than just targeting specific keywords. By aligning your content with the user’s intent and the broader topic they’re searching for, you can create a more relevant and valuable online experience, ultimately improving your search engine rankings and driving more qualified traffic to your website.

The Meaning of Semantic SEO

At its core, semantic SEO is about moving beyond the traditional keyword-based approach and embracing a more holistic understanding of search. Instead of simply targeting individual keywords, semantic SEO involves identifying the underlying concepts, entities, and relationships that are relevant to your target audience’s search queries.

By understanding the semantic context of a search, you can create content that better addresses the user’s needs and provides a more satisfying experience. This, in turn, signals to search engines that your content is highly relevant and valuable, leading to improved rankings and increased visibility in the search results.

Why Semantic SEO is Important

In today’s digital landscape, search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their ability to understand the nuances of language and the contextual meaning behind search queries. As a result, traditional keyword-focused SEO strategies are becoming less effective, as search engines prioritise content that demonstrates a deep understanding of the user’s intent and the broader topic they’re searching for.

By embracing semantic SEO, you can stay ahead of the curve and ensure that your content is optimised for the way people are actually searching and consuming information online. This not only improves your search engine rankings but also enhances the overall user experience, leading to increased engagement, conversions, and long-term loyalty from your target audience.

The Difference Between Keywords and Topics in Semantic SEO

One of the key distinctions between traditional SEO and semantic SEO is the focus on topics rather than just individual keywords. While keywords are still important in semantic SEO, the emphasis is on understanding the broader context and relationships between different concepts and ideas.

For example, instead of just targeting the keyword “healthy recipes,” a semantic SEO approach would involve identifying the various subtopics and related concepts that are relevant to the user’s search, such as “nutrition,” “meal planning,” “dietary restrictions,” and “cooking techniques.” By creating content that addresses these broader topics, you can better align your website with the user’s search intent and provide a more comprehensive and valuable online experience.

Developing a Semantic SEO Strategy

Crafting an effective semantic SEO strategy requires a deep understanding of your target audience, their search behaviours, and the broader context of the topics they’re interested in. Here are the key steps to developing a successful semantic SEO strategy:

1. Conduct Thorough Keyword Research: Start by identifying the primary and secondary keywords that are relevant to your business and the topics you want to target. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to uncover the most valuable keyword opportunities.
2. Analyse Search Intent: Examine the search queries and user intent behind your target keywords. What are people looking for when they search for these terms?    Are they seeking information, making a purchase, or something else?
3. Identify Semantic Relationships: Explore the connections and relationships between your target keywords and the broader topics they’re associated with. Use tools like Google’s Knowledge Graph, Semantic Scholar, and Wikidata to uncover the entities, concepts, and contextual information that are relevant to your target audience.
4. Create Comprehensive, Topical Content: Develop content that addresses the broader topics and semantic relationships you’ve identified, rather than just targeting individual keywords. Ensure that your content is highly relevant, informative, and valuable to your target audience.
5. Optimise for Semantic Elements: Incorporate semantic markup, such as schema.org, to help search engines better understand the context and meaning of your content. This can include things like structured data, entity recognition, and natural language processing.
6. Monitor and Iterate: Continuously track the performance of your semantic SEO efforts, and be prepared to adjust your strategy based on changing search trends, user behaviours, and algorithm updates.

Examples of Semantic Topics in SEO

Here are some examples of how semantic SEO can be applied to different industries and niches:

E-commerce: Instead of just targeting the keyword “women’s shoes,” a semantic SEO approach might involve creating content that addresses broader topics like “summer footwear trends,” “comfortable work shoes for women,” and “vegan leather shoe alternatives.”

Health and Wellness: For a website focused on healthy living, a semantic SEO strategy might involve targeting topics like “mindfulness and stress management,” “gut health and digestion,” and “natural remedies for chronic pain.”

Travel: A travel website could focus on semantic topics such as “sustainable tourism,” “family-friendly vacation planning,” and “off-the-beaten-path destinations,” rather than just targeting generic keywords like “vacation packages” or “travel deals.”

Implementing Contextual Optimization Techniques

Effective semantic SEO relies on a range of contextual optimization techniques to ensure that your content is aligned with the user’s search intent and the broader topic they’re interested in. Some key strategies to consider include:

1. Semantic Keyword Research: Use tools like LSIGraph, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to identify related keywords, concepts, and entities that are relevant to your target audience.
2. Topical Content Creation: Develop comprehensive, in-depth content that addresses the entire scope of a topic, rather than just focusing on individual keywords.
3. Structured Data Markup: Implement schema.org markup and other semantic HTML elements to help search engines better understand the context and meaning of your content.
4. Natural Language Processing: Leverage natural language processing (NLP) techniques, such as entity extraction and sentiment analysis, to gain deeper insights into the user’s search intent and the overall context of their query.
5. Contextual Link Building: Build high-quality backlinks from relevant, topically-aligned websites to strengthen the contextual relevance of your content.
6. Semantic Analytics: Use tools like Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and SEO analytics platforms to track the performance of your semantic SEO efforts and identify areas for improvement.

Tools for Semantic SEO Research and Analysis

To effectively implement a semantic SEO strategy, you’ll need to leverage a variety of tools and resources. Here are some of the top tools to consider:

Measuring the Success of Your Semantic SEO Efforts

Tracking the performance of your semantic SEO strategy is crucial for understanding its impact and identifying areas for improvement. Some key metrics to monitor include:

• Organic Search Traffic: Monitor the overall increase in organic search traffic to your website, as well as the growth in traffic for specific semantic-focused pages.
• Keyword Rankings: Track your rankings for both primary and secondary keywords, as well as the broader topical clusters you’re targeting.
• Bounce Rate and Time on Page: Analyse user engagement metrics, such as bounce rate and average time on page, to gauge the relevance and value of your semantic-optimised content.
• Conversion Rates: Monitor the impact of your semantic SEO efforts on key conversion metrics, such as lead generation, sales, and email sign-ups.
• Backlink Profile: Examine the growth and quality of your backlink profile, as well as the contextual relevance of the linking websites.

By regularly reviewing these metrics and adjusting your semantic SEO strategy accordingly, you can continually optimise your content and improve your overall search engine performance.

Conclusion: Harnessing the Power of Semantic SEO

In today’s digital landscape, where search engines are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their understanding of language and user intent, embracing semantic SEO is essential for staying ahead of the competition and driving long-term success for your business.

By focusing on the broader context and meaning behind your target audience’s search queries, you can create content that is highly relevant, valuable, and engaging, ultimately leading to improved search engine rankings, increased traffic, and stronger customer relationships.

Do you want to advance your SEO strategy?

Contact our team or digital marketing experts today to learn more about how semantic SEO can transform your online presence and drive sustainable growth for your business.

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How Smart Algorithms are Changing the Way We Optimise Websites

Search engine optimisation (SEO) has long been a crucial component of digital marketing. With AI, SEO is becoming even more sophisticated. AI-powered algorithms are helping businesses optimise their websites for search engines by analysing user data, identifying trends, and predicting future behaviour. This means that businesses can create content that is more targeted and engaging, which ultimately leads to better rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).

How AI is Helping Agencies Offer Better Results

AI is also transforming the way professional SEO services are offered. SEO agencies are leveraging AI to identify new opportunities, track changes in SERPs, and analyse the competition. This allows them to offer more comprehensive and effective SEO services to their clients, which in turn helps businesses achieve better rankings and generate more traffic.

How AI is Helping Businesses Get Found Locally

For businesses that rely on local customers, AI is playing a significant role in local SEO services. AI-powered tools are helping businesses optimise their listings on Google My Business and other local directories. This means that businesses can be found more easily by local customers, which can lead to increased foot traffic and sales.

How AI is Helping Businesses Reach More Customers

Social media marketing is another area where AI is having a major impact. AI-powered tools are helping businesses analyse customer data, predict behaviour, and identify trends. This allows businesses to create more personalised and engaging content, which in turn leads to better engagement and conversions on social media platforms.

How AI is Helping Agencies Offer Better Services

AI is also transforming the way social media marketing agencies offer their services. By leveraging AI-powered tools, agencies can offer more targeted and effective social media marketing campaigns to their clients. This ultimately leads to better ROI and increased brand awareness for businesses.

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The post COOKIES appeared first on TronMedia.

Having gone through the website which is very intuitive if I may add, it really is possible. Scary, but possible.

How we perceive the future to be might is here already. Robots taking our jobs? That has been going on for a while now, hidden in plain sight. Look at the car industry and even when you shop it’s self-service now mate! Robots!!!!!!

The future-business.org gives you a more in-depth look at what the future holds for us.

I think it’s well worth a look.

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Why is content marketing important?

Marketing activities fall into two broad categories – paid and unpaid. If your business is to be prominent in the results of searches made on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and others then it is important to have content on your website that encourages those search engines to include your website in the results of searches that are relevant.

If, for example, you are in the business of making, or selling, safety footwear then you want to feature in the results whenever someone searches for safety footwear related topics. If the search engines don’t know that your business is relevant to the person making the search then your site will not be featured in the results. Content marketing is important therefore in order to inform search engines that you are involved in whatever you are involved in so that they can add that content to their indexes and show your URL and site details to those carrying out a relevant search.

In fact, one of the single most important items of content that you can spend time and effort on is what is called the “Meta Description” of your pages. Each page has its own unique meta description and this forms the small snippet of text that appears below your URL in the search results and tells the view in around 150 characters, what you do and why they should visit your site.

Content most often takes the form of text but that is changing. Text does not have to be the only format you use. Video content is becoming more and more important and is much easier to produce now due to the many apps available and the high quality of footage that can be produced with a smartphone. Add audio into the mix alongside visual content marketing by recording useful podcasts for your clients and potential clients – a podcast is an audio blog, sometimes carried out in the format of an interview and are very popular because people can listen to them whilst doing something else, for example driving to or from their place of work.

Content converts. Websites that contain a good selection of content that is relevant to their product or service will find that more people are likely to visit their website and stay on it for longer. If good quality content is available to help them to understand or learn about the topic in question then they are more likely to purchase the product or service from you. It follows therefore that a good way to increase conversions is to give potential buyers the information that they need in order to make a buying decision.

Is Content Marketing Effective?

The short answer to this is yes – if it is good content and if it is published in the right place where search engines can find and index it so that it can be included in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Websites that do the minimum possible usually end up losing traffic to those that give the website visitor more to explore. Google even has a term for this – “Bounce Rate”. This metric is an indicator of how many people visit a website and then leave it again within a few seconds and without interacting with the site, e.g. by clicking on a link to visit another page. If your site’s Bounce Rate is high, (it is a percentage) then that means that people visiting the site are not finding what they need and leaving. One of the best ways to counteract this is to provide lots of information about whatever it is that the site is about. This usually takes the form of articles but, as previously mentioned, videos as well as podcasts (audio presentations), quizzes and so on, all have a part to play.

When building a website it is a good idea to avoid the temptation to put everything on one page – this is a trend that has surfaced in recent years as web designers think it looks cool but, in the eyes of a search engine, it is difficult to work out what the site focuses on and the visitor doesn’t need to click onto a different page thereby making it more likely that their visit will be counted as a bounce.

Sites with a high bounce rate are treated less favourably by search engines so put plenty of content on the site in order to minimise this.

Another way in which content marketing is effective is to improve brand reputation. It is a good idea to try and publish your content on special interest websites as well as on your own. If you have video content then a YouTube channel is another option when it comes to spreading the word about your product or service. It is free to setup a YouTube channel and, if you do it properly, your (video) content will be found in Google’s search results with a link to the video. Once someone is taken to your YouTube channel to view the video they will also see your other content – you can include a link to your website from the description placed underneath the video.

How To Get Started With Content Marketing.

The way most people tackle this is to set up a blog on their website. Most website building platforms, such as WordPress, have excellent blogging facilities and there is usually no cost involved unless you choose to outsource your article writing requirements.

Blog posts should be at least 1500 words in length and should focus on a small number of keywords. For example, if writing about vegetable gardening then focus on the main keyword, in this case, “vegetable gardening”. Make sure that the term “vegetable gardening” is in the page’s “Meta Title” as this is usually the first thing a search engine will read when crawling your website and it forms the bold part of the listing when shown in search results.

If you try to focus on too many keywords the search engines will struggle to identify what the focus of the piece is and often they can end up indexing it for those terms that are of lesser importance.

The main keywords should appear several times in the body of the text and in the titles and subtitles – known as H Tags – throughout the piece. Do not be tempted to overdo it through – this is regarded as “keyword stuffing” and is frowned upon by search engines. A density of around 2-3% is ideal, i.e. the keyword or phrase should represent no more than 3% of the total word count.

Many businesses find that they do not have the necessary resources in house to write articles, social media posts and blog posts themselves and find it necessary to use the services of a third party author or copywriter. This is a common practice and enables you, the business owner or manager, to concentrate on what you do best.

Always ensure that the content you acquire is original, i.e. not copied from other sites, as this is not acceptable to web search engines and they can penalise you for it. It is OK to quote short passages however, so long as you cite the source.

Try to write ephemeral content whenever possible, i.e. content which does not age quickly. If your content is outdated quickly then you will need to update or replace it frequently. Of course, if you are publishing, for example, a newsletter, then this type of content, by its very nature, will age quickly so alongside the news try to include some ephemeral content as well.

How To Create a Content Marketing Strategy?

Content marketers usually plan their content production according to the needs of the business in terms of lead generation, brand building, product launches, special promotions, and so on.

This planning process takes into account seasonal trends and online search trends that indicate interest levels over time. You can easily check on the interest levels for a subject by referring to Google’s “Trends” facility which gives you an indication of how much search activity there has been for a particular term or topic. You can find this tool here: https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US

Another factor that plays an important part in devising your content marketing strategy is the activity of your competitors. An easy way to check this is to do a Google search for a keyword or phrase that is important to you. When the results are shown, ignore the paid ads and look at the first few “natural” results – which websites are featuring highest in the results for a particular search term? Make a note of the top 3 or 4 and visit the sites, taking a good look at the content they have and then start planning to produce similar, (but not the same), content yourself.

While Google’s “Trends” tool will help to tell you when to publish your content, the other factor you should consider is where to publish it. Obviously, your own website will be high on the list but it should not be the only place that your content sees the light of day. It is likely that there will be other websites, blogs, social media pages and similar properties where your material could be seen by interested parties.

When looking for suitable websites on which to publish your material you should, of course, avoid competitor sites. Instead, look for sites which publish material about the subjects that your product or service address. For example, a golf professional wanting to gain traffic might consider writing and submitting material to a website about golf. Very often, website publishers find it difficult to produce enough content for their sites and welcome “guest posts” to help lighten the load of writing all the content themselves without the need to pay for it to be written. This is known as “guest blogging”.

As well as guest blogging there are also many sites where material can be published and has a chance of being seen by interested parties. Sites like Reddit provide a platform where you can submit articles and posts about almost any subject and they will be seen, (but not necessarily read), by people interested in the subject that you are addressing in the article.

One of the most accessible platforms where you can publish material is the social media site. If you are addressing a profession, “B2B” (Business to Business) audience then LinkedIn may be worth considering. You can publish an article free of charge on your LinkedIn page and, if you have enough followers, it will be seen, and possibly read, by a substantial number of people. Facebook offers a similar opportunity with the option to “boost” your post for a small fee and have it shown to a larger audience of interested parties.

Once you have identified the social Media sites that you want to publish your content on you can make the task easier by using a tool such as HootSuite, which enables you to schedule your posts and submits them automatically for you saving a great deal of time and effort.

5 Advantages Of Content Marketing

Content Marketing can improve brand reputation.

By writing about your brand and the products or services that it provides, in a way that gives the reader information which is useful to him/her, you are adding value to the readers experience and building “authority” for yourself or your business as a source of information about that subject. This works particularly well if you write articles that address a particular problem that the reader might have, e.g. “How to improve your golf swing”.

Content marketing helps bring in new leads.

Almost every business needs an ongoing supply of fresh leads or enquiries. By publishing your content in places where it can be seen by people who are likely to need your product or service at some point you are making your business accessible to those people at the time that they may be considering making a purchase. Most platforms that you can publish on, other than your own website of course, will let you include your URL (website address) to the article so that it can be clicked on by the reader.

This is called a “backlink” and not only enables the reader to go to your site but also strengthens your website in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Search engines like Google place great value in measuring how well your website is linked to by other quality websites. I cannot stress enough however that these links should occur naturally, usually from websites that are relevant to your own. Google and others will soon spot if you are procuring links from sites that have no relevance to your own or, worse still, if you are buying links from providers that do this as part of their business. This used to work a few years ago but it doesn’t work now. If you get caught, and you will, then you could find yourself being penalised by the search engines and your website falling in the rankings.

Content marketing can help to increase conversions.

The more a potential customer for your product or service knows about you, your business and your products or services, the more likely they are to make a purchase.

By providing information on your website and elsewhere about what you do, you are building the customer’s confidence in you and your business. This is why you see many e-commerce sites back up their online shop listings with libraries of information about how to use those products, e.g. a DIY store that sells tools and also providing short guides about how those tools could be used. This is a good example of where a video might also be used – just check out YouTube next time you want to learn how to do something and consider that others will be doing the same thing. Make sure it is your video they see and not someone else’s.

Content marketing helps improve SEO.

Anything you can do to lift the level of visibility your website has online will help towards optimising it’s online visibility. We have already mentioned the advantage of gaining backlinks to your site by publishing your content in places where it can be seen by potential customers and where you will be likely to be able to include a link to your website from within the article or blog that you publish. This is a known factor in improving the overall SEO of your website and should be done wherever and whenever possible as long as the target site is of good quality and repute – poor quality links can have a detrimental effect.

By including plenty of content on your own website you will increase the chances of the visitor staying on the site for longer and exploring the content you have provided there. If you are an e-commerce site then this is important – people often need a bit more detail than can be provided in a simple product listing before they make up their mind to buy.

Content Marketing Improves Customer Relationships.

By providing your existing customers with a source of news, updates, user guides and reviews about your product or service you are helping them to get more from their association with you as an existing or potential supplier. In the longer term this will do far more to build and strengthen the customer relationship than just sending them purely sales-related emails and other promotional activity can do.

As you may have gathered, content marketing is a term which covers many different activities and not all of them will be relevant to you and your business. Try as many as you can and monitor the results so that you can work out what you should concentrate on in the future.

TRON Media can help with all your digital marketing requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in digital marketing, content marketing, web design, SEO, PPC, digital strategy and social media, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build a digital marketing strategy perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading Digital Marketing Agency ln Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to help you reach your audience. Get in touch today to find out about our latest email marketing and web design services, and what a creative digital agency can do for your business.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call on: 020 7870 9041 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

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What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Before I answer that question it is important to be aware of the various ways in which business can come to you via online channels. The available channels vary according to how your business operates and the fundamental difference between those businesses which operate locally and those which are national or international in nature.

The reason for this distinction is the way in which search engines treat enquiries that are made by people who are looking for a product or service and who are likely to have an intention to buy that product or service either straight away or at some point in the future.

Google and Bing both analyse the searches which are made and try to establish whether it is a local search or not. These two types of search are treated very differently by these major search engines and this is why your digital marketing strategy should be tailored according to the type of business model that you operate.

For locally based businesses the most important aspect of your digital marketing strategy should be to be prominent on the Google maps listings when appropriate searches are made. This involves being accurately setup using a free of charge application from Google which is known as “Google My Business.”

If you own or work in a locally based business then you should certainly consider your presence in Google My Business and, if nothing else, make sure that your business is registered and verified on that platform – you will find everything you need on this link:

For those businesses who operate nationally, or even internationally, the approach is different. These businesses do not depend on local traffic and therefore need to concentrate on their visibility across a much wider audience.

For national, international and global businesses, the focus should be on building authority for their website and ensuring a prominent position in search engine results when someone in their targeted geographical area carried out a search for a product, service or topic which is relevant to them. The fact that someone has carried out such a search would normally signify that they are looking to buy or find out about that product, service or subject.

The digital marketing strategy for these businesses therefore is to gain visibility across all of the platforms where their potential customers, subscribers and so on, are likely to be looking for whatever it is that they make, sell or do.

How Do You Create a Digital Marketing Strategy?

First of all it is important to have a good idea of what you are up against. Even if you have a really good website, full of interesting content and, if you sell a product or service, really good, competitive pricing, you will still underperform if your online competitors have even better websites, better pricing and so on.

In other words, you are only as good as your competitors allow you to be.

Therefore, the first thing to do is to make an assessment of your competition. Marketers call this a “competitor landscape” or something similar.

The typical contents of a competitor landscape would be:

• A list of competitors against whom you are competing for online traffic.
• A list of key search terms which potential customers, clients, subscribers etc are likely to use if they are looking for your product or service.
• An assessment of the key metrics which tell you how well each of the above competitors is doing, relative to each other.

A quick “snapshot” metric is produced by MOZ and is known as “Domain Authority” and can be discovered, free of charge by opening a free account at: https://moz.com/free-seo-tools. DA is a metric measured out of 100, i.e. a percentage, and will give you a rough idea as to how your website, and your competitor’s websites, are performing in search engine results pages, (known as SERPs).

Whether or not your competitors are using ads to enhance their website’s visibility for certain search terms or keywords. You can do this by carrying out relevant searches and noticing whether the competitor appears in the ads which appear on Google or Bing’s search results pages.

Once you know who your competitors are, you can start to try and understand why they are performing better, (or worse), that your own site is currently performing. The free MOZ tool linked to above will tell you much more about your competitors but, at this stage, the main thing it will do for you is tell you who your top search competitors are. These are the competitors that compete for the same keywords in searches as the domain that you type in, (which can be your own or a competitor’s), ranked by visibility.

Other factors you can try to establish about how your competitors websites are performing, compared to your own, include:

• Which keywords or search terms they are most visible for, compared to your own site – this can be found by entering their web address into the MOZ free tool as described above. Please be aware that there are other platforms offering a similar service, the best known of which is SEMrush, but we are concentrating on MOZ here because they compile the Domain Authority metric.

• Whether or not they are using PPC (Pay Per Click) ads to boost their visibility for certain search terms. PPC is offered by Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Linkedin and many other platforms. You will need to enlist expert help when setting up PPC campaigns since mistakes can be very costly in terms of wasted clicks which cost money.

• How much use they make of Social Media. Do they have a Facebook page for their business? How many followers do they have? how often do they post content onto that page? and so on.

A website that has a healthy and active presence on Facebook, (and other social Media Platforms), will generally do better than one which does not. For those websites which target a B2B, (Business to business) audience, LinkedIn may be a better fit.

Important note – your online competition is not necessarily the same as your offline competition. Online, the “currency” is not expressed simply in financial terms but in terms of website traffic. Generally speaking, a website with high levels of relevant traffic will outperform one with a lower level of traffic, even if their product is of lower quality or higher in price.

Why Is a Digital Marketing Strategy Important?

The internet is a crowded place. Visibility is important to any business or organisation that needs to stand out from the crowd and be found online. Every business needs a strategy to ensure that their website is visible to those who are searching for its products or services and this visibility can be achieved in a number of ways, including:

Building up the “authority” of your website to ensure that people will visit it and find it easily in search results. This is usually achieved by publishing a lot of good quality content on the website and making sure that it gets indexed by all major search engines so that it can be found by those who are searching for it. This process is known as content marketing.

By having a strong presence on major Social Media platforms and posting fresh content regularly that followers can easily engage with.

Many businesses find to their cost that simply posing numerous posts will not, in itself, help them to be more visible – the posts have to be engaging for the viewer and encourage them to interact with it.

Ensuring that your website is technically sound – all content setup in a way that search engines will recognise and include in their index. This means checking that all elements of your website and its pages are correctly setup.

Ensuring that your website’s content marketing strategy is varied and includes more than just text – videos are popular and enable you to be included in search results for searches where you may have missed out if your content were text only. A YouTube channel is very important in this respect and you can set one up for free. There are many ways to produce effective videos for your business without having to pay an expensive video production company. A good selection of videos on your site and/or linked to your YouTube channel will improve your visibility quickly and effectively.

Making use of PPC ads on platforms where your target audience is likely to be searching for your product or service.

Whilst all of the above could lead to your website getting more traffic and converting some of those visits into customers or clients, to simply carry out those activities in isolation, without a structure, could easily lead to your marketing budget being wasted.

Try to identify which approach is likely to give you the best returns and set a budget with clearly identified targets such as number of enquiries received during a given period and as a result of a specified number of website visits. All of this information can be identified using Google’s free-of-charge Analytics platform which you are strongly advised to install if you haven’t already done so – ask your website developer to be sure to install the Google Analytics tracking code onto all of your website pages.

What Are The Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies?

Different business types and sizes will require different digital marketing approaches. As I’ve already mentioned, a business with a relatively small local clientele, such as a restaurant, hair salon, driving school, or auto repair shop, will need to tackle the issue differently than one with a larger clientele.

Gain Local Visibility

Gaining presence on Google, Bing, Apple, and other comparable services’ map listing systems should be a top priority for locally focused businesses. These postings are highly useful and cost-free.

Content Marketing and Authority

Those targeting a wider audience will benefit from putting more emphasis on optimising their website content for the search terms that are really important to them. The more content your website has, the better, as long as it is original and of good quality. Content should be varied and include text, video, possibly audio (podcasts) and other content such as quizzes, surveys and forums related to your product or service where your customers and potential customers can participate. Never copy content from other sites, this will result in unfavourable treatment by search engines.

As well as placing content on your own site it is well worth considering trying to get your articles and other content published on other relevant sites – a process often referred to as “guest blogging”. This is valuable on several levels, firstly it means that more people will see your content thus increasing your “authority” in that subject but it also means that, usually, the publisher of the target website will allow you to link back from their site to your own.

Backlinks

Such “backlinks” are very useful in increasing your websites Domain authority and are well worth spending some time in acquiring. A word of caution through – don’t ever be tempted to pay for such backlinks – Google hates this and will come down upon you like the proverbial ton of bricks if you do it.

lists

Use a platform like Listly to publish lists relevant to your product or service, e.g. “Top Ten Upgrades for your Home Cinema System” etc. These lists, when published on a platform like Listly, can link back to your website and give your rankings a significant boost.

Paid Ads

Both local and nationally/internationally focused websites could benefit from PPC and other types of paid ads however these should be handled carefully in order to avoid wasting budget on “vclicks” that are unlikely to result in a conversion.

Ad types and targeting will be different for these business types with a local focus who are advised to concentrate on reaching a prominent position in the local listings that accompany all map results – known as the “Map pack” on Google, rather than trying to dominate the top of the search results on the national or international platforms of Google, Bing and others where competition is likely to be strong and well-funded.

As well as placing ads on search engines like Google, which are designed to target those who are probably already somewhere on the buying cycle and will progress towards making a commitment or purchasing a product or service, they may also be placed on relevant third party websites using Google’s “Display Network”.

This can be very effective if done properly but care must be taken to ensure that the placements are relevant. Google will try to do it automatically if you let it but frequently gets it wrong – always select your target sites manually after careful research as to their audience demographics which can be found in the Google Ads system.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media is often suggested as being an effective platform for marketing a business website. It isn’t necessarily the case however. Many businesses of my acquaintance have spent hours and hours posting content onto their social media pages without achieving any real, or noticeable, results. The reason can be summed up in one word – “engagement”. Not only do people have to see your social media posts, they have to read them and, critically, take some action as a result of having seen them, even if it is only to “like” them. Ideally, such posts should have some kind of call to action which will result in a measurable result, e.g. a visit to your website, request for a report, viewing a video etc.

Social Media is also a place where paid ads can effectively be placed. Since there are no keywords in Social Media ad systems the type of marketing carried out there is generally demographically targeted – social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn hold huge amounts of data about their members including age, gender, education, interests etc and this can be used to accurately target those who are most likely to be interested in your products or services.

YouTube & Video Marketing

YouTube is also becoming increasingly popular as a place to run ads alongside videos that are relevant to your product or service. These ads can be placed via the Google Ads system, (previously known as AdWords), and are still reasonably priced. Many people are deterred from YouTube advertising because they think that they will need to have videos made but that is not the case – you can advertise on YouTube without the need to have videos although it may well be worth getting some made and we suggest setting up a (free) YouTube channel for your business as this can be a significant boost for your website in search results on Google and YouTube.

Shopping Ads

If you run an online shop, (e-commerce), then Google’s Shopping Ads could be just the thing for you. These ads are automatically generated by Google, (Bing has a comparable service), from a product feed that you provide – most online shopping platforms like Shopify, Woo Commerce etc will generate these feeds automatically so the process is really quite straightforward. You will need an image for each of the products you wish to include.

Use Remarketing and Email Marketing to catch the ones that get away

Make sure you remarket – “Remarketing” (AKA Retargeting), is the process of anonymously gathering lists of people who have visited your website, noting what they seemed to be interested in, and then showing them reminder and progressing ads until they finally convert into a customer. If you can build a list of customers and prospective customers you can remarket to them by sending regular promotional emails – this method is widely used and can be very effective if done properly however there are strict regulatory controls in place to prevent abuse so be sure to take professional advice.

5 Digital Marketing Trends for 2020

Voice Search

As more people use voice search on devices such as Alexa and on search engines like Google it is now the time to start planning how you should tailor your website to benefit from this. In order to appear in voice searches the content on your website needs to be formatted in a way that such technology can recognise. There are many aspects to this but in essence it means writing the website content in a way that fits in with Google’s search result display techniques. The most common way to achieve this is to ask your website developer to incorporate “Schema” coding snippets into the website’s content so that search engines can recognise it and place it into voice search results as well as “knowledge panels” and other search engine result elements. This requires planning and careful preparation but is well worth the effort – voice search is set to boom as devices become more affordable and widely available.

Brand Management and User Participation

The trend towards involving clients/customers and users in the development of a brand and its overall reputation moves forward, powered by and increasing number of available platforms and review sites. It is now almost compulsory to have a business or product page on Facebook, LinkedIn and elsewhere and user groups comprising existing users of your products or services are a useful way to involve people and benefit from their feedback – they can also be a useful source of referral business as well. Once again we encourage you to setup a Google My business account for your business as this will open up the availability of Google Reviews which are taken into account when assessing your ranking in local and national search results. It is important to monitor reviews and comments closely and to respond to everything that is said – good or bad – in order to prevent adverse reviews escalating into unpleasant situations.

Video content

We have already mentioned the importance of including video content onto your website. This is because Google and other search engines are ranking sites higher if their content is more varied and includes at least some video. Facebook and other Social Media sites are becoming more and more focused on video content and this is showing signs of ramping up fast during 2020.

Micro-Moments

The concept of “Micro moments” recognises the fact that the buying public are less and less concerned with a lengthy buying process and more likely to gravitate towards solutions that give them what they want quickly, or even better, instantly. The main driver for this has been the availability and widespread usage fo mobile devices such as smartphones.

However, to position your product or services in such a way that it is readily to hand when someone has such a micro moment and makes the decision to buy, almost without warning, can be tricky. It involves reassessing your website’s content and ensuring that it is highly optimised for the triggers that are likely to result from such a micro moment. For many website owners this is a major rethink and should be carried out with expert help if required.

Interactive Content

As I said earlier, just cramming your website and/or social media page(s) with passive content is no longer enough. Try to involve your audience by giving them something to interact with, such as a quiz or competition or maybe a quick survey. Offer them a useful free download such as a checklist or “beginners guide to…..” – anything to make them feel part of the community that likes, uses or recommends your products.

As you can see, the marketing of a website can be achieved in many ways and there are many factors involved that are not always apparent at the start of the process. This is why it is important to do the initial research into the market you are operating in, know the competition and how they work so that you can work better and win the business.

Constant monitoring, using Analytics and other monitoring tools, is also vital – what works one day might not work the next so always keep your finger on the pulse of your site and act upon the data that you are getting.

There is no single solution to achieving online visibility and there is no wisdom in relying on a single marketing approach. Try to be seen as often as possible by those who are likely to be looking for you or your products and services and give them as many opportunities as possible to find you and become one of your clients, customers, subscribers, members, or whatever it is that your business needs in order to thrive.

All of your needs for digital marketing can be met by TRON Media. We can work with you to develop your ideas and create a digital marketing strategy that is ideal for your company because we have a highly qualified team of specialists in digital marketing, content marketing, site design, SEO, PPC, and digital strategy.

TRON Media is a leading Digital Marketing Agency in Brighton. Get in touch today to discover more about our services and learn what a creative digital agency can do for your business. Contact us using our Contact Form, call us on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

The post Why Do You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy in 2020? appeared first on TronMedia.

A Global Digital Ad Trends study for 2019 concluded that “Digital advertising almost single-handedly drove the expansion in total media ad spend around the globe this year”, and certainly it’s true that there are now endless opportunities to reach out to new prospects – but there is also more competition. Content ranging from blogs and videos to infographics, published by the million every day, make it harder to put your message in front of your potential customer.

That’s where PPC comes in. PPC give you access to a targeted audience, chosen according to their location, interests, age and so on, and makes sure that your message is getting to the right people.

But pay-per-click management will become more essential as the options for maximising returns increase.

So what PPC trends can we expect to see in 2020, and how will PPC advertising continue to be effective in the face of competing methods of digital marketing?

10 PPC Advertising Trends You Should Expect In 2020

1.How PPC Automation Will Be Effective

2.How Responsive Search Ads Will Work in 2020

3.Why There Will Be Less Organic Search Results In Internet Searches

4.How Artificial Intelligence Will Be Used Within PPC Advertising

5.Why There Will Be An Increase In The Amount Of Video Ads/a>

6.How Voice Searches Will Increase In 2020

7.Which Different Advertising Platforms Will Become More Popular in 2020

8.Why Remarketing Will Still Be Effective in 2020

9.How There Will Be An Advanced Segmentation Of Audiences

10.How Virtual Reality Will Become More Popular Within PPC

1. How PPC Automation Will Be Effective

One of the most significant PPC trends in 2020 will be PPC automation. PPC advertising using Google Adwords can be a time-consuming, manual business, particularly if you are interested in top performing keywords or particular timeslots. But with PPC automation, you can leave the hard work to software. For instance, Opteo continuously monitors AdWords accounts for statistically significant patterns. When something important comes up, Opteo suggests an improvement backed up by real data. Opteo also includes a set of tools to help you manage accounts, monitor performance, browse segments, track budgets, and get alerts when important changes happen.

Pay per click management tools like Opteo allow you to view all key performance metrics in one location, and to get additional metrics not available in AdWords, including QS Components, AdRank and more. You can manage accounts in one unified table, drill down to view adgroups, keywords, and other components, and get complete control over bids and campaign budgets.

An adgroup contains one or more ads that share similar targets, and each of your campaigns is made up of one or more ad groups. You can use adgroups to organise your ads by a common theme, for example you could try separating ad groups into the different types of product or service you offer.

PPC automation of this kind frees you up to plan and refine your PPC strategy to reach your target audience rather than having to manage time-consuming manual management, and if you need advice on how to set it up, a digital marketing agency can help.

Search Engine Journal suggests that it’s also important to integrate your PPC and SEO. Using PPC data to inform SEO of the most viable and profitable keywords to target for organic ranking boosts, using SEO ranking data alongside PPC bidding to identify which keywords you should be paying for, and using PPC copy data to help identify the best messaging to use for meta data in SEO, you should be able to use PPC advertising alongside SEO organic listings to make your brand more prominent on SERPs.

For bidding purposes, Conversion XL suggests that it’s important to find new keywords and put them into SKAGs (single-keyword ad groups). It’s argued that once campaigns are up and running, you will be able to identify which ones are converting, and when you find search terms that are converting and have a substantial amount of impressions, it’s worth breaking them out into their own SKAGs.

If the search terms that convert most consistently are part of a broader keyword with a lower bid, “you may not be reaching the full potential of that exact search” says Conversion XL. “By extracting the high-converting search terms into their own SKAG, you’re able to bid more aggressively and maximize Impression Share.” There are even automated tools to break high-converting search terms into their own SKAGs.

Another point to remember about AdWords is that ad extensions can now be used to deliver extra snippets of relevant information about your business to your AdWords text ads, and this will become more popular in 2020. Ad extensions can include the location of your business, its phone number, business ratings, and more. There are two categories of Ad Extensions: Automatic and Manual Ad Extensions. Manual Extensions are much more powerful because of their customizability and reporting simplicity.

APIs – Application Programming Interfaces – will also have an increased role to play in PPC management. An Application Program Interface acts as a ‘middleman’ between two applications so they can communicate with each other. The API, often just a small piece of code, eases the burden of repetitive processes which otherwise would have to be done manually. The Google Ads Application Program Interface for instance allows apps to interact directly with the Google Ads platform, and can do a lot of what the Google Ads Editor and user interface can do, but automatically. The AdWords Application Program Interface can help with creating new ads, ad groups, and campaigns, and could, for instance, pause a campaign when inventory is low.

Speaking on Search Engine Journal, Puneet Vaghela of Adzooma said: “Attribution measurement will be your KPI in 2020… Make sure to use Google Analytics or other analytics tools to measure the direct and indirect effect of your target keywords on your overall business…the most important metrics will be interaction with the website, buttons that have been clicked, form engagement and completion, and telephone calls and call interaction. These are all metrics you can find within Google Ads and through Google Analytics, and import them into your Google Ads account to set up automated bidding… Set up goals within Google Analytics to track how people interact with your site (e.g. for a form), set up goals for each step of the form process. Link your Google Analytics with your Google Ads, and import your goals into Google Ads as a conversion type. You can then start using automated bidding or CPA bidding based on these metrics to understand which keywords are driving the more engagement, and then push more budget into these areas.”

2. How Responsive Search Ads Will Work in 2020

One of Google’s most significant new introductions is Responsive Search Ads. Unlike traditional search ads, where you write your headlines and descriptions together to create static ad text, Responsive Search Ads allow you to write up to 15 different headlines and up to four different descriptions.

These headlines and descriptions can be arranged in 43,680 different permutations, so the possibilities for ad testing are extensive. Google can automatically test these different combinations of headlines and descriptions and learn which perform best or your target audience. In time, Responsive Search Ads will learn to serve the most effective ad text to different searchers depending on the search keyword, type of device, past browsing behaviour, and other data.

A Responsive Search Ad can show up to three 30-character headlines, a display URL with two 15-character path fields, and up to two 90-character description fields. With up to 300 characters of total text, that twice the length of an Expanded Search Ad, and is the largest type of ad text you will find on search engine results pages (SERPs).

But Josh Colbeck of marketing agency Blueclaw says that in tests, initially at least “Responsive ads were significantly outperformed by existing expanded ad text ad formats in terms of CTR [click-through rate] and CVR [conversion ratio]” – he suspects the main reason being the need for responsive ads to always have headlines tailored to the user’s search term.

However, Michelle Morgan of digital marketing agency Clix says that responsive ads have helped increase CTR for Google Display Network ads, an improvement arguably good for advertisers and Google alike.

Certainly it’s true that there’s a limit to how many impressions you can ‘buy’ with PPC. As Brian Carter explains on Search Engine Journal, a client whose goal is to dominate the market and get as much profit as possible by spending as much as possible soon runs into the problem of limited PPC impressions. “Just maximizing spend does not get you all the impressions in the world” he explains. “We’ve seen accounts only receive 20 percent of available impressions for their favoured keywords despite an unlimited budget.” He suggests other ways to maximise your impressions, including improving a quality and selecting Accelerated Ad Delivery in your campaign settings.

There are other tricks to improve your CTR, such as using ad extensions, site links and extended headlines, but remember that improved CTR does not necessarily translate into additional conversions. Pay per click management services can advise you on this and other crucial PPC techniques for 2020.

3. Why There Will Be Less Organic Search Results In Internet Searches

Data shows that in 2019 Google is delivering less organic search results traffic than in 2018. According to Merkle’s digital marketing report for Q2 2019, Google’s organic search results visits are down 8 percent – the effect is even more marked with Bing and Yahoo, with decreases of 26 percent and 11 percent respectively.

Although organic search results produced 23 percent of all site visits in Q2 2019, total visits produced by organic search fell 6 percent year-by-year in Q2 2019, which is down even further from a 2 percent decline in Q1 2019.

Organic search results visits were down particularly on mobile phones, where visit growth dropped from 13 percent in Q1 2019 to 5 percent in Q2 2019.

So what’s going on? It seems that paid search visits on phones could be cutting into organic visits. Phones and tablets produced 59 percent of organic search visits in Q2 2019, compared to 65 percent of paid search visits. So the biggest share gainers in Q2 2019 were paid search, and direct site visits.

This is one of the PPC trends which digital marketers will have to be aware of in 2020 when setting their campaign budget – though certainly searchers previously exposed to a particular brand through paid search may be more likely to click and engage on organic content in the future.

Google made a change to the way ad position is determined in September 2019. Ad position is the order of your ad in the auction results as compared to other ads. But an ad position of “1” doesn’t necessarily describe the location of your ad on the search results page – your ad position may not be above the organic search results. It can be your ad position if there are no ads above the search results, and your ad is the first ad shown beneath the organic search results. Google now determines the which ads to show and how they’re positioned by calculating Ad Rank for every ad in the auction through its ad auction process.

Ad Rank is a value used to determine your ad position, or whether your ads will show at all. To calculate Ad Rank, Google takes your bid amount, ad quality, search context, device and so on, as well as the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats. Your Ad Rank is recalculated each time your ad is eligible to appear and competes in an auction, which is why ad position can fluctuate depending on the amount and quality of competition and other factors.

Want To Find The Best SEO Trends For 2020? Read our 10 SEO Trends For 2020 That You Need To Know Blog Post Today…

4. How Artificial Intelligence Will Be Used Within PPC Advertising

Artificial Intelligence in PPC advertising has two main applications; in increasing the effectiveness of your PPC ads, and in reducing the amount of time you have to spend on managing them.

For instance, AI can learn from data such as users’ purchase behaviour and history, device type, demographics, and web browsing activity, and can understand the connection between keywords and campaigns. In this way AI can determine which web searches are most likely to lead to your target audience and conversions.

AI can also be an aid to budget management, discovering new keyword opportunities and optimising bids. You don’t necessarily need to build or pay for specialised tools to do this, as many free AI tools already exist on Google, Bing and Amazon.

In Google Ads, for instance, you have a choice of Enhanced CPC (an enhanced form of manual bidding allows the Google Ads algorithms to adjustm the manually set keyword bid), or a selection of fully automated strategies including Maximize Conversions, Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Clicks, and vCPM (viewable cost per thousand impressions), and more.

All these AI tools have value, but none of them should be treated as ‘set and forget’ – you still need to monitor their results to make sure that they are achieving your particular digital marketing goals.

At the end of the day your CPC – Cost Per Click – is the performance metric you should use to measure the effectiveness of your PPC campaign. CPC is a simple calculation – if you pay £100 for your ad and it receives 100 clicks, you’re spending £1 per ad click. As you score more clicks, your CPC becomes lower, and this is often used as an indicator of a successful campaign. Of course CPC is useful in other types of media channel besides PPC – and remember that it’s sometimes worth increasing your CPC if it leads to a better qualified audience.

AI can also be helpful when calculating bid adjustments. Bid adjustments are a way of controlling your advertising spend to improve your ROI. Performance metrics from Google Ads will show which keywords, locations, times, and devices perform best for you, and Google Ads then allows you to set ‘base bids’ and ‘modifier bids’ setting different levels according to time of day, best content, targeting method, remarketing lists and so on. Bid adjustments allows you to raise or lower your bids to manage the visibility of your ads, as an alternative to Google’s automatic bidding.

While the use of AI is clearly one of the PPC trends to watch for 2020, we’re some way away from AI systems being able to have dynamic conversations with consumers and to assess their emotional state, though a recent report from Invoca and Adobe suggests that over half of consumers believe the future should entail a combination of human and automated interactions.

AI could also help you manage your daily budget, defined as the amount that you set for each ad campaign to specify how much, on average, you would like to spend each day. You can set an average daily budget for each Google Ads campaign, and on days when your ad is more popular, Google Ads will allow up to twice your average daily budget, so you won’t miss out on valuable clicks. But using AI, Google can make sure that you don’t exceed your average daily budget spread out over a month (though for campaigns where you pay for conversions, your daily spend may exceed your average daily budget by more than twice).

5. Why There Will Be An Increase In The Amount Of Video Ads

Search Engine Journal suggests that video advertising “is becoming the dominant force in the digital marketing universe.”

The argument is that consumer attention spans are dwindling as fewer people are willing to read large amounts of text, and more spend time looking at video advertising on screens, mainly on portable devices.

Biteable explains that  video trends set in 2019 will continue into 2020. It quotes Hubspot statistics stating that 81 percent of businesses use video as a marketing tool, up from 63 percent the previous year, and that 78 percent of people watch online videos every week, and 55 percent every day. Hubspot also claims that 72 percent of customers would rather learn about a product or service by way of video, and Google stats suggest that 6 out of 10 people would rather watch online videos than television.

According to Insivia, mobile video consumption rises by 100 percent every year, and Ciso estimates that by 2022, online videos will make up more than 82 percent of all consumer internet traffic.

The vast majority of these video plays, according to eMarketer, are on mobile devices – 75 percent in fact.

So in terms of sheer consumption, video is the format of the future. But in terms of marketing, video also has advantages in that according to Insivia, viewers retain 95 percent of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10 percent when they read it as text.

More social media platforms are following Facebook’s lead by prioritising video content, perhaps because according to Wordstream social video gets shared 1200 percent more than text and images combined.

eMarketer concludes that mobile video ad spend is expected to be around 72 percent of the total digital ad spend in 2019, and Insivia says that a website is 53 times more likely to reach the front page of Google if it includes video.

PPC trends in 2020 will certainly include a move towards more video advertising material, and ROI will come to depend a good deal on the quality of visual content. This applies as much to social media such as Snapchat and Instagram, news platforms including Buzzfeed, entertainment channels such as YouTube and company websites, and to all types of material from video advertising to educational content, reports and entertainment.

Technological advances such as 5G make video advertising much more practical, and video offers advertisers a chance to deliver a deeper message to consumers, whether it’s a short ‘micro-video’ as the start of a purchasing journey, a traditional 30-second format ad, or an ‘outstream’ video which autoplays when the user scrolls near it.

According to a Cisco estimate, 80 percent of all internet traffic in 2019 will be video content, and video traffic globally will increase by 300 percent from 2016 to 2021. This is in line with the increasing dominance of social media such as Facebook, which is ideal for delivering video content to a target audience and which offers improved targeting through demographic and other data.

In conclusion, Cisco says that video is expected to make up 82 percent of all internet traffic by 2021, so you should join the 93 percent of marketers estimated by Singlegrain to use video – so long as you remember some basic points. For instance, Marketing Land says that 82 percent of viewers hate video that autoplay, and Ad Age says that 33 percent of viewers will stop watching a video after 30 seconds, so keep it short…

6. How Voice Searches Will Increase In 2020

Voice search might not be coming along as fast as some predictions suggested – it was supposed to be the ‘big thing’ in 2018 and 2019 – but let’s examine developments in the market.

• Strategy Analytics shows that shipments of smart speaker devices, mainly from Amazon and Google, grew nearly 200 percent year-on-year in Q3 2018.
• Globally, sales of smart speakers are expected to surpass $30 billion by 2024, with smart speakers becoming among the top-selling consumer electronic products (Source: Global Market Insights).
• 55 percent of households are expected to own smart speaker devices by 2022 (Source: OC&C Strategy Consultants).

Demographic data suggests that younger users make more use of voice search, with 61 percent of 25-64 year olds saying they’ll use their voice devices more in the future (Source: PwC).

A Price Waterhouse Coopers report says “There’s no denying that voice is the future. The technology will continue to drive and shift consumer behaviour, and companies need to prepare and adjust accordingly. Search, advertising, content, and commerce are being impacted industry-wide as consumers transform the way they interact with brands as the result of voice technology… general awareness of voice technology is high, only 10 percent of surveyed respondents were not familiar with voice-enabled products and devices. Of the 90 percent who were, the majority have used a voice assistant (72 percent). Adoption is being driven by younger consumers, households with children, and households with an income of >$100k.”

However, there’s still a tendency for voice assistants to be used at home rather than on mobile devices – PwC says “Despite being accessible everywhere, three out of every four consumers (74 percent) are using their mobile voice assistants at home. The majority of focus group participants were quick to say that they prefer privacy when speaking to their voice assistant and that using it in public ‘just looks weird’. This could explain why 18-24-year olds are using their voice assistants less, as this age group tends to spend more time outside the home.”

There’s one problem with voice search – Google estimates that its bounce rate is 9.56 percent  higher than desktop. Bounce rate – defined as a visit to your website which doesn’t get further than the landing page before clicking back to search – is notoriously difficult to interpret as it can have a number of causes. But a common one is when a mobile user comes across a site which is not properly optimised for mobile use. If you plan to optimise for voice search, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see if your website passes muster, or your bounce rate will inevitably shoot up.

7. Which Different Advertising Platforms Will Become More Popular in 2020

It’s unlikely that there will be any major changes in the popularity of the most prominent platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for B2C, and LinkedIn for B2B, so that is where most of the typical campaign budget will continue to be spent.

Facebook ads represent a big investment but remain among the top platforms. This PPC offering is in many ways similar to Google AdWords, but Facebook ads obviously cater for an audience of heavy users of social media. Facebook allows you to create your own PPC ads within the Facebook Ads Manager, and these can be of several types including standard images, video ads, or carousel ads carrying a selection of different links. Facebook ads can be used in a variety of positions on Facebook including the sidebar, desktop or mobile newsfeed, and audience network, and can also be displayed on Instagram.

Instagram ads have their own advantages. Because of their integration with Facebook you get all the benefit of campaign customisation, choice of formatting and targeting abilities, combined with Instagram’s wide reach of over 600m users. Instagram ads have an engagement ten times higher than Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest and 84 times higher than Twitter.

But it is getting harder for brands to achieve good levels of organic reach on these platforms. AdEspresso admits for instance that Instagram ads have the problem that the “sheer volume of posts being uploaded daily can drown out your content, even if your target audience is excited to see it.” There’s a sense that user fatigue is setting in – particularly with Facebook which is mired in controversy and often the subject of ‘digital detoxing’.

Young users particularly are leaving Facebook for other platforms, and Twitter has plateaued in terms of new membership. The increasing ‘pay-to-play’ nature of these two means that it is becoming harder to guarantee a good ROI using them.

New social media platforms such as TikTok, which carries short-form user-generated videos, are increasingly popular – TikTok now has around 500 million monthly active users, and has been installed more than 1.1 billion times. The problem with platforms like this is that they are of little value to B2B advertisers for PPC advertising – 41 percent of users of TikTok are aged between 16 and 24, so it is only of real use for the B2C market. Another problem is that platforms like TikTok seem to come and go unpredictably – witness the demise of Vine and Kik Messenger.

Pinterest, though, seems to be a better long-term bet. Ideal for promoting products since it is image-based, Pinterest plays well with prospective customers – in fact according to the brand’s own attitude and usage study in 2018 “75 percent of Pinterest users say they are “very interested” in new products, compared to just 55 percent of people on other social media platforms”.

Marketers also reportedly think that Pinterest now resembles Instagram when the latter emerged, with no obtrusive ads, a user-friendly search engine, and no fake influencers.

Amazon Advertising, previously Amazon Marketing Services, or AMS, was launched as a search advertising solution for Amazon vendors in 2018. Amazon Advertising is similar to pay-per-click ads on Google, in that sellers only pay when shoppers click on ads. According to Amazon, “76 percent of Amazon shoppers use the search bar to find an item, and search advertising is a way for brands to stand out among the competition”, so while Amazon market share is less than that of Google and Facebook, Amazon Advertising will expand to the point where it may break the long-standing advertising duopoly of Google and Facebook.

For B2B users, LinkedIn ads represent an alternative to consumer social media. LinkedIn ads are intended to reach an audience of professionals looking for employment opportunities and networking. LinkedIn ads allow you to post both visual and text content to 590m users. There are two paid options, LinkedIn Ads and Sponsored Content. Both are more expensive than Facebook Ads or Google Ads, but offer a better quality of leads. Though LinkedIn ads appear quite small and low-profile, they offer powerful targeting criteria by location, industry, company size, title and so on; but they may be less effective than the more expensive LinkedIn Sponsored Content.

Still, if you are no longer getting good ROI from Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, or want to engage with an audience which is not using these platforms, there are alternatives worth considering for 2020.

Still Unsure On What Advertising Platform To Use? Get In Touch With Us and Speak To One Of Our PPC Specialists today…

8. Why Remarketing Will Still Be Effective in 2020

In 2018, Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey, was quoted as saying that he was exclusively focusing on remarketing in 2019, “Because they have much higher CTRs [click-through rates] and conversion rates.” He went on to say that he was combining remarketing with Facebook’s Click to Message ad format – “Combining these two tactics yields ROI that I haven’t seen since 2013 when ad prices were much lower,” he said. But will this continue to be true in 2020?

Davit Aleksanyan of Directive Consulting says that remarketing continues to be important as long as it can lead to an improvement in conversion rates. A remarketing strategy can bring back audience who left your website without converting, and improve your overall conversion rate.

Aleksanyan concentrates on Google Ads and YouTube remarketing, pointing out that successful remarketing should aim at people who visited your pages through paid efforts and did not convert. “You can target anyone who visited organically or through direct channels. However, you may lose some control over the quality of trackable traffic” he says.

A successful search campaign should translate well into your remarketing campaign, and can even become hyper-targeted if you create a custom remarketing strategy for each of your search campaigns.

As remarketing techniques follow your users through the Google Display Network (GDN), you should make sure to  exclude any topic and content types you don’t want your ad to appear next to. This can be done using content exclusions in the main settings of your display campaign.

Another area for increased attention will be the Google Merchant Center. If you run an ecommerce site, rather than using PPC to position ads under the search bar, you might be more interested in the Google Shopping ads to the right of it. These list only physical, tangible goods, but account for over half of Google ad spend in the USA.

Google Merchant Center is where you tell Google you have a product to sell, supply the information necessary for Google to create an ad for you, and share additional information so Google knows which customers are best served by your product. Google Merchant Center doesn’t manage your shopping ad bidding strategy, create your advertising campaigns or track the performance of individual ads – these tasks are handled through Google Ads and Analytics. But Google Merchant Center will handle details such as product ID, price, image, universal product identifier, and a link to the product on your webpage.

9. How There Will Be An Advanced Segmentation Of Audiences

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal says that segmentation of audiences will be one of the top trends for PPC in 2020.  He explains that Audience Segmentation is based on taking people who have interacted with you online, either by visiting your website of social media channels, or from your CRM database, and sorting them according to parameters such as which parts of your website they’ve visited, whether they completed a purchase, what videos they have watched and so on.

They are then placed into ‘buckets’ which serve specific ads based on their previous interactions. You can then increase or decrease your PPC bids to adjust your prominence to your audiences based on what value they have to your business.

Baker argues that in 2020, this audience segmentation will become even more in-depth, as the increasing amount of data gathered on audiences makes it possible to personalise messages according to audience interests, age gender, demographic group, device type, use of keywords, and even emotional state, powered by AI evaluation.

By including these specific data sets, as well as the inferred emotional data, you should be able to target your ads with extreme precision, identifying exactly where you want to spend your resources to increase your business.

10. How Virtual Reality Will Become More Popular Within PPC

If there’s one subject which divides opinion, it’s the usefulness of Virtual Reality in digital marketing and in PPC particularly. While everyone seems to think that Virtual Reality could be the Next Big Thing, it’s not entirely clear that the public is embracing the new technology. After all, it demands a financial commitment – Oculus costs from around £200, and HTC Vive from around £500 – and a real enthusiasm for consuming Virtual Reality material.

While Virtual Reality offers an advertising opportunity which is part of an entertainment experience, there’s very little data to suggest how VR users will react to different types of virtual ad campaigns. VR ad platforms like Immersv and VirtualSky (slogan: “More than viewability. Engulfability.”) offer formats from short pre-roll ads that play before an app loads, to longer form videos that play between levels of a VR game.

While VR has some exciting potential – such as the ability to track users’ eye movements to record what parts of the screen they are looking at – it’s a long way from proving that it offers higher forms of user engagement or interactivity.

TRON Media can help with all your PPC and digital marketing requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in PPC, website design services, SEO, website security, email marketing, WordPress, HTML coding, CMS, paid search marketing, Google Ads, content marketing, digital strategy and social media, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build a PPC campaign perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading PPC and digital marketing agency in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to guarantee that PPC works for you. Get in touch today to find out about our latest PPC strategy planning, web design services, email marketing services, and what a PPC agency can do for your business.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call Simon on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

The post 10 PPC Advertising Trends You Should Expect In 2020 appeared first on TronMedia.

But SEO is not a single skill or strategy – is involves a whole raft of techniques dedicated to making your website maintain a high profile online, and these techniques are changing all the time as the algorithms used by search engines to determine page ranking change and evolve. This guide to the latest SEO trends will keep your digital marketing strategy fresh, and make sure that the time and money you spend on SEO is not wasted.

Our SEO Trends 2020 guide will explain why yesterday’s SEO techniques will not necessarily work today or tomorrow, and how you can use tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to find the right keywords for search in your market, improve your search engine rank and domain authority, and reach your target audience.

If you’re a user of the free version of Google Analytics, and if you have a free Google Analytics property collecting hits exclusively from the Google Analytics Services SDK (Android or iOS), bear in mind that Google is starting the process of deprecating the “legacy” Google Analytics for Mobile Apps, and will be replacing it with Firebase Analytics as the new paradigm for Google’s mobile app analytics.

Voice Search

Voice search is on the rise with the increasing popularity of devices such as Alexa and Siri. It’s quicker to search by voice than by text, and it’s cool too – so one of the top SEO trends for 2020 is to make your digital marketing plan voice search compatible.

There’s no downside to making your traditional SEO campaign compatible with voice search – you are certain to gain rather than lose. Both types of search rely on keywords, the only difference is that voice search tends to use longer, more conversational phrases to compile its search results. Voice search also tends to evolve quicker – so you have to be on top of current trends and make sure that you are always adding new voice search keywords.

The key to voice search is the well-known ‘5W1H’ formula – most voices searches start with the words ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’ ‘where’ ‘why’ or ‘how.’ Many voice searches are for local businesses, so they often end with a phrase such as ‘near me’, or near a specific location in their search results.

Keyword suggestions tools such as AnswerThePublic, Wordstream and Google’s People Also Ask are now becoming more clued-in to voice search, so they will suggest closely related questions when you look for popular voice search phrases.

Voice search will be particularly important in local SEO. Around 46 percent of searches on Google already have local intent, and by 2020, the figure will be around 50 percent. The increase in voice search will make long-tail keywords more important in local SEO, which will become tougher as more businesses try to make it to the top of the ranking in search results. Positive reviews and user engagement will become key in local SEO, and hyperlocal searches will also become a more important part of local SEO.

If you have a local business, it will become essential to register with Google My Business, claim your Google My Business page, and make sure that your business is registered in the correct category (as well as in the invisible categories allowed on Google My Business).

Omni-channel marketing

The next in our list of the latest SEO trends 2020 is omni-channel marketing, a term describing the principle Adobe calls “getting your channels in sync”.

Adobe Campaign offers a single, easy-to-use interface for campaign orchestration, so your online channels, such as email, web, mobile and social, match your off-line channels, including direct mail, call centres, the in-store experience and so on. The idea is to give your customers a consistent experience in both digital and traditional channels, so everything from YouTube videos to podcasts to marketing emails adds to the customer experience.

Aaron Agius on Hubspot explains: “All omni-channel experiences will use multiple channels, but not all multi-channel experiences are omni-channel. Remember that. You can have amazing mobile marketing, engaging social media campaigns, and a well-designed website. But if they don’t work together, it’s not omni-channel. An omni-channel experience… accounts for each platform and device a customer will use to interact with the company. That knowledge is then used to deliver them an integrated experience. Companies using this technique align their messaging, goals, objectives, and design across each channel and device.”

The end aim of omni-channel marketing is to deliver a better customer experience – to do that you will need to co-ordinate your product, marketing, sales and customer support departments.

User Experience

User Experience, known as UX, is defined as the overall experience of a person using a digital product such as a website or computer application, particularly in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use. The terms is said to have been coined by Don Norman of Apple, who argued that everything from how well a product package fits into your car to how good your in-store service is can be part of a user experience which can be profitably improved.

UX is not the website or product itself, it is how the user experiences it; and that has a direct connection with SEO. Stoney deGuyter writes on Search Engine Journal: “I’m ashamed to admit it, but in my very earliest days, my optimization practices constituted getting the keyword on the page as many times as possible without ruining the visitor’s on-page experience. It’s heartening to know that I, and the industry at large, have come a long, long way since then.

“The typical SEO professional doesn’t have to be a full-fledged UX expert. However, they should have an understanding of many of the basic website UX principles. UX optimization is nothing more than focusing on the visitor. Everything we do in the sphere of web marketing has to have the visitor in mind. Yes, we do certain things for search engines, but search engines (almost always) require those things because they have learned it’s what their users (searchers) want.”

deGuyter cites the following as some of the essentials of UX:

• Language – keywords give us valuable insight into how searchers think about products and services – sometimes they don’t use the language of professionals, so we must be aware of user intent, and understand the problems and solutions they are looking for.
• Clickthroughs – your website doesn’t have to be top of the SERPS if you capture the visitor’s attention with enticing language and title tags
• URLS, Breadcrumbs and Meta Descriptions – these follow your title tag, and should give additional information to the searcher regarding the relevance of the result
• Keep the scent – once the searcher has clicked through to your website, you have to keep them on the scent by quickly confirming that you have what they came looking for, and encouraging them to continue engaging with your site until they get a resolution
• Site ID – identifications such as a company logo should be big, obvious and uncluttered, and header tags should confirm the information the user is there for
• Navigation – if you have many products or services, don’t hide them all under one menu entry – group them into relevant headings in your navigation
• Content optimisation – this is the real meat of your website and must fulfil the user’s requirements. Each page should be focused on a single topic and have a single goal expressed in a call to action
• Page load speed – nothing puts off potential customers more than a site which responds slowly. Google Page Speed Insights is an essential tool in analysing problems. Page load speed can be improved by technical SEO, and is likely to become a more important aspect of site ranking, particularly for mobile applications. If your page load speed is longer for mobile than it is or desktop, you need to pay particular attention as Google is starting to rank websites on a ‘mobile first’ basis.
• WordPress plug-ins such as Yoast can be very helpful in optimising the user experience of your website. Yoast can automatically optimise just about every aspect of a website, going far beyond checking relevant keywords, to testing every aspect from meta description, title tag, URLs, site structure and many other elements. Yoast is free and very powerful, but you may well need the help of a digital marketing agency to manage the fine points of UX, as it requires a grip on web design, content creation and distribution channels which are often beyond the resources of a small or medium business.

Artificial Intelligence

One of the most significant SEO Trends 2020 will be AI – Artificial Intelligence. While AI is becoming more familiar through its use in smart assistants, self-driving vehicles, navigation, smart home security and other applications, it also has many functions in the worlds of marketing and SEO.

So far as digital marketing is concerned, the main impact of AI is that it is used to determine how Google’s search algorithms decide how to rank pages. Search engines use AI to detect tricks such as keyword stuffing and irrelevant backlinks, so it’s necessary to know how these machine learning system work to keep up with the way the affect page ranking. AI can also be used to analyse customer data, for instance in matching brands to relevant influencers, and in personalisation of marketing messages. A good example is the way Starbucks collected information from loyalty cards and mobile apps, and used it to push menu recommendations to smartphones as customers approach stores.

AI also has a role to play in voice search, and Google is constantly refining Google Assistant to understand natural conversation better.

Aim To Rank In Google’s Featured Snippet

Though everyone would like their website to rank number one on SERPS, that can be very difficult to achieve, particularly if your competitors have a big budget. But one of the latest SEO trends is a way to leap-frog to victory, and that is to rank as Google’s featured snippet. This isn’t easy either, but it can be done without a huge budget.

The ‘featured snippet’ shows up in ‘position zero’ right above the first organic search results, as a block containing the exact answer to the user’s query. Most of the time it also contains an image.

There are three main types of featured snippet which could appear in position zero – paragraphs of text, bullet-pointed lists and tables. But how do you optimise for featured snippets?

Keyword research is the first basic technique. In your keyword research, aim for question-type searches, and make sure that your website answers questions that most of your target audience will ask.

You should still try to rank on the first page of Google results, as nearly all featured snippets in position zero are found on the first page. Improving your organic search rankings remains valuable.

Think about user intent in searching, rather than just keywords. User intent, the goal or intention a user has when entering a search term into a search engine, is now regarded as more important than individual keywords as a ranking factor. User intent is normally categorised in one of three ways: informational, where the user intent is to find out more about a subject; transactional, where the aim is to buy something; or navigational, where the user intent is to be led to a certain site.

Write content in the ‘inverted pyramid’ style taught to journalists; make sure the essential information is in the opening line, then expand with more details in the remainder of your content. Use words that are likely to generate featured snippets in position zero, such as ‘when’, ‘mean’, ‘define’ and ‘become’ – avoid those that don’t, such as ‘best’, ‘free’, ‘diagram’ and ‘guide’.

Format your content to suit the sort of featured snippet you would like to see – for instance as a paragraph, a table or a series of bullet points.

Q&A pages often show up in snippets, so it’s worth including one on your website, but remember that most featured snippets are between 40 and 58 words in length.

If you need help researching keywords, there are many free and paid-for keyword tools to help you. Brian Dean of Backlinko recommends these keyword tools, among others:

• Soovle

Scrapes suggested keywords from Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon and more

• Jaaxy

Suggests thousands of keywords in seconds, together with data on competition, search volume and potential traffic

• Ahrefs Keywords Explorer

Provides very in-depth information on each keyword such as a breakdown of first page competition and how many searchers actually click on a result

• SECockpit

Very powerful keyword research tool with in-depth data on search trends, organic competition and traffic estimates

• Google Keyword Planner

Not the most feature-heavy keyword tool, but benefits from coming straight from Google’s database

PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing never stands still, and John Bowman on TheeDigital blog suggests among others these developments:

• PPC Automation

Although PPC automation isn’t perfect and an effective PPC campaign still requires some hands-on management, if you set up accurate and effective conversion tracking and write good ad copy with properly identified target audiences and keywords, you can pass a lot of work to Google’s algorithms.

• Smart Bidding

Use a machine learning-controlled automated bidding system which optimises conversions and conversion values in auctions. Some examples include Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Target Cost-Per-Aquisition (CPA), and Target Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS).

• Amazon PPC

Amazon is beginning to compete with Google and Facebook in the PPC market, and displays ads both on and off of Amazon, which has improved its popularity with online retailers. It also has advantages over Google and Facebook in terms of buyer intent.

• Social Media PPC

Around 70 percent of people no check at least one social media platform a month, so the growing use pf PPC in social media shouldn’t be ignored.

Focus On Building a Brand

Digital marketing guru Neil Patel says that SEO should be at the heart of building your brand – “Because SEO is all about improving user experience — that’s why Google cares about a site’s speed, web design, high quality content marketing, mobile-friendliness and so on.”

Your brand image, Patel explains, is a reflection of how your users feel about you, and is the sum of their experiences of your website and other marketing tools. For that reason, your brand should focus on being:

• Credible: Your brand must prompt trust and show signs of authority.
• Findable: Your content should be easy to find and search
• Useable: Your website should be easy to navigate
• Desirable: The design of your website should be appealing
• Useful: The content of your website should be useful, relevant and of high quality
• Accessible: Your site should be useable by people with disabilities

All these attributes, Patel says, should be built into your brand awareness, and add up to an ideal user experience. He argues that as part of your policy for building SEO into your branding, you should pay attention to the following tips:

1. First offer value

Google’s search algorithms penalise sites that have marketing material above the fold, so make sure the value material is presented first and your users don’t have to scroll down to find it.

2. Keep keywords in text

Text embedded in images can’t be read by search engines, so it doesn’t add anything to your SEO. Make sure your keyword-rich content is kept in text, not hidden in images.

3. Build your sitemap

There are many tools you can use to build your sitemap, and as this helps both your users and search engines, you should do it as soon as you start developing your brand.

Create High Quality Content

It’s become clear that Google’s search algorithm is concentrating more and more on the quality, depth and breadth of a website’s content, so it’s increasingly important to make sure that the content of your site is of a high standard. Simply posting repetitive or low-value content is no longer sufficient to keep Google happy – if it isn’t good enough to acquire links, it won’t enhance your rank on SERPS.

The issue with low quality content, says digital marketing consultant Alexandra Tachalova, “is that it isn’t good enough to acquire links, so there’s a slim chance that it’ll rank on Google. Think twice about publishing such posts, since they won’t pay off. It’s better to do one post that is properly distributed every few months than doing several per month that will only receive a few visits.”

So you should ask yourself when you create a post whether it will answer a question for your customers, make a sale, generate a lead or improve your domain authority or reputation.

Remember the mantra E-A-T – for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness.

Analysis of the way that Google’s algorithms decide page rank seems to indicate that websites containing content on health, nutrition, medicine, law, finance, government and safety are particularly affected by changes made in 2018.

If you are in this area, Lola Michaels of State of Digital makes the following suggestions to improve your EAT status:

1. Check website security

Make sure you have the correct SSL certificate, use complex passwords and invest in security solutions

2. Emphasis user engagement

Invite user reviews to build your popularity and authority

3. Consult experts

Ask in-house and external experts and journalists to contribute to your blog and resources and give them each their own bio page to position them as thought leaders

4. Display your credentials

Include any industry awards, certificates and memberships in your web design to win your visitors’ trust

5. Conduct research

User survey results, anonymised customer data and qualitative research to present authoritative data. Make sure any use of customer data is GDPR compliant.

6. Provide contacts

Make sure there’s an easy way for your customers to contact a human service assistant

Podcasts are likely to become more important in SEO in 2020. Google started displaying podcasts in search results in 2019, and Google certainly has the technology to transcribe podcasts, so in 2020 it will probably start returning podcast audio clips in search results.

Create Video Content

While text remains the most common form of content on websites, one of the top SEO trends 2020 is a growing use of video. According to Wordstream, video drives a 157 percent increase in organic traffic from SERPs.

Wordstream’s analysis also suggests that a third of online activity consists of watching video, and that marketers who use video grow revenue 49 percent faster than those who don’t – not surprising as 54 percent of users say they want to see video, and regard it as the most interesting and engaging form of brand content.

YouTube, for instance, has over 1b users and draws more of the 18-49 audience than any TV network. People watch over 1b hours of video on YouTube every day, and 90 percent of users say they have learned about a new brand or company on YouTube.

So what do you have to do to make your video SEO friendly? The main requirement is to add a description of your video content with SEO keywords. Then make sure you have an accompanying text post for your video. Finally, but a call to action directing users to your video content, and watch the engagements pile up.

Actually making engaging video content isn’t as difficult as it used to be; you can use a studio, presenters, lights, video and sound recording equipment, an editing suite and so on; but you can also use readymade templates from websites such as Biteable, just inserting your own images and product details where required.

Optimise Your Website For Conversions

One of the latest SEO trends, Conversion Optimization (or Conversion Rate Optimisation, CRO) is about getting a user to perform a desired action on a website, usually buying a product, clicking a link or signing up for something such as a newsletter.

While conversion optimisation can be very data-driven, it can be valuable to think of it from the point of view of the user – ask yourself what drives them to you website, what can make them leave before converting, and how you can hook them to convert.

Typical conversion optimisation rate, calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors to the site and multiplying the result by 100 to get a percentage, can be depressingly low – maybe around 1 to 4 percent. But as everyone’s conversion goals are different, it doesn’t do to worry too much about whether your conversion rate matches up.

There are some time-worn best practices for conversion optimisation – such as placing CTAs above the fold, using strong colours for CTA buttons, reducing the number of fields on forms, making time-limited offers, and so on – but you can pretty much assume that your competitors are all doing this.

Hotjar says that one of the best SEO trends 2020 is to take a more customer-centric view of CRO, emphasizing the following points:

• Listen to what your users have to say about your product/service
• Immerse yourself in the market
• Watch how people use your service
• Talk to whoever designed and built the product
• Speak to the staff that sell and support it
• Draw connections between different sources of feedback

Quantitative tools such as Google Analytics, website heat maps, sales funnel tools and form analysis tools will help you to track website traffic and measure customer satisfaction, and A/B testing tools will help you to test different variations of a page to find the best performers.

But as Ben Jesson, CEO of Conversion Rate Experts puts it: ”People are always asking us about best practices for conversion. You know the kind of thing: magic buttons that convert, “killer” copywriting words, winning layouts, etc. Unfortunately, that little box of tricks doesn’t take you very far. In fact, it sometimes takes you nowhere. The real best practice isn’t a particular type of page element at all. It’s a well-defined, systematic approach to CRO… when it comes to improving your website, don’t guess what the blockages are. Find out. The key question is ‘Why aren’t visitors converting?’ The answer typically comes from research in the following core areas: understanding different visitor types and intentions, identifying user-experience problems, and gathering and understanding visitors’ objections.”

One area in which Moz claims to be expert is on-page optimisation. On-page optimisation is the practice of optimising individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page optimisation refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.

Invest In Technical SEO

Investing in technical SEO is one area where you will almost certainly need the help of a digital marketing agency. A comprehensive SEO strategy will incorporate both on-page optimization and the behind-the-scenes technical SEO which makes your website web crawler-friendly. The easier you make it for search engine web spiders to index site, the better your SERP ranking will be. This isn’t one of the latest SEO trends – it’s always been good practice – but it will become more important as fine degrees of website performance become crucial.

The technical tricks of SEO change all the time as Google algorithms evolve, so simple tricks are no longer necessarily effective. But here are some of the basic requirements of technical SEO.

1. Speed Up Your Website

By optimising image sizes, enabling browser caching and compression, reducing server response time and using a content delivery system, you can increase your site’s page response speed and avoid being penalised by Google

2. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

You’ll be severely penalised by Google is your website is not adaptable to mobile devices. Use tools such as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, HubSpot’s Website Grader and Bing’s Mobile Friendliness Test Tool to check. Use Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), which get highlighted in SERPs.

3. Optimise your internal links

Though internal links don’t have the same impact on rankings as external links, it’s still worth checking, for instance, that you use descriptive keywords in anchor text so you give a sense of the keywords he source page is targeting.

4. Choose your URL

Having a single canonical URL can avoid duplicate content issues

5. Check your certificates

Make sure your site’s SSL certificates are up to date

6. Use Google Search Console

You can check and fix crawl errors by analysing your site using Google Search Console

7. Use structured data markup

Many websites are generated from data stored in databases and formatted into HTML code. This can be difficult for web crawlers to interpret. Use structured data markup to enable search engines to better understand the information on your business’s web page, and your search results will improve. For instance, structured data markup makes it easier for web crawlers to determine company basics, such as NAP (name, address, place) data. Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper is a useful free tool to help with this task.

Backlinks will continue to be an important factor in SEO in 2020; before about 2012, backlinks may have played a role of about 45 to 60 percent in site ranking. That has dropped now to more like 50 percent, but backlinks still represent the third biggest factor behind content and user experience.

2020 may also see questions raised about Moz and the way it ranks Domain Authority. Julie Joyce says on Search Engine Journal: “Domain Authority (DA) is Moz’s way of telling us how well a website should rank, using a 0 to 100 scale. The higher the Domain Authority, the better chance it has to rank, theoretically… please please please don’t confuse it as being an actual Google metric… Moz even specifically states that Domain Authority is not used by Google… You simply cannot judge a site by its Domain Authority, or by its Domain Rating, or by its anything else that’s just one metric…Domain Authority is not a metric used by Google in determining search rankings and has no effect on the SERPs.”

Our SEO Trends 2020 guide will give you a taste of the exciting new developments in the field, but get in touch with a digital marketing agency for all the latest on the latest SEO trends.

TRON Media can help with all your digital marketing and SEO requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in SEO, digital marketing, PPC, website design services, website security, email marketing, WordPress, HTML coding, CMS, paid search marketing, Google Ads, content marketing, digital strategy and social media, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build a digital marketing campaign perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading SEO marketing agency in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to guarantee that SEO works for you. Get in touch today to find out about our latest SEO and digital marketing management services, web design services, email marketing services, and what an SEO campaign can do for your Google ranking.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call Simon on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

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The fact is that (despite the natural resistance to ‘spam’ emails), people actually enjoy getting e-mail from brands they trust, and having your customers and potential customers on an e-mail list makes it easy for you to deliver your marketing message directly to them, leading to more conversions. In fact one advantage of email marketing solutions is that when someone signs up to your email list it’s a sign that they are interested in your brand and product – all you have to do is reel them in, and our email marketing tips will explain how to do it.

Remember that according to Radicati, over half the people on the planet use email – that’s around 3.9b users, expected to grow to 4.3b by 2023. Almost 3b emails are sent every day (around 50 percent of them spam), and the average user receives 30 emails per day. Around 85 percent of users check their emails on a smartphone, while mobile platforms account for almost half of the emails opened.

The most important figure, though, is that 50 percent of users prefer to communicate with brands via email, more than for direct mail (20 percent), social media (seven percent) and phone (also seven percent).

So email marketing is certainly a valuable marketing tool, and is likely to become more and not less relevant as the number of users worldwide expands.

What Is Email Marketing?

So what exactly is email marketing? Simply enough, it’s a form of direct marketing replacing postal ‘snail mail’ with electronic mail – it’s a fast, cost-effective, measurable, environmentally friendly way to build trust with your customers, keep them informed about new promotions, products and services, and turn sales prospects into conversions.

One of the major advantages of email marketing is that because your customers have to opt in to be on your email list, you know that they are interested in your products and services. Another is that by using email marketing software such as Mailchimp to track analytics such as open rates, click through rates and bounce rates, you can measure the effectiveness of your email marketing and amend your campaign to suit with minor effort.

Particularly for a small business, email marketing tends to be a preferred method of marketing, because it’s very easy to track your ROI, and you don’t have to put money behind it to get it to the correct audience. Though SMS marketing operates in similar ways, email marketing solutions have the advantage that they reach desktop users as well, and can be the preferred method for smartphone  users too.

Email lead generation is the most effective online tactic according to Ascend2’s report, Lead Generation Strategy Trends. Shane Barker of Content Solutions says: “A good email lead generation strategy is highly targeted and involves a specific plan to generate and convert fresh leads… typically, email lead generation campaigns involve the following steps:

• Create quality content to promote your business on social media, and guest blog to generate site traffic.
• Impress your site visitors with insightful content and entice them to give you their email addresses.
• Incentivize them with a lead magnet to convert them into paying customers.
• Interact with your prospects on a regular basis, and send them relevant emails.”

B2B email marketing opens up other possibilities. The options for email personalisation, email segmentation and curation make B2B email marketing a uniquely powerful selling tool. Emails have a longer lifespan than social media posts, and offers ways to encourage re-engagement (making passive subscribers become active again).

B2B email marketing is ideal for distributing new product announcements, and news of events, personnel changes, awards or policy developments. And B2b email marketing certainly offers a good ROI – in fact B2BMarketing.net says that B2B email marketing has an ROI of over 3,000 percent, and that this is still rising.

Another variation, direct email marketing, is when direct email marketing a standalone advertisements made to look like a web-based ad rather than a typical email messages is sent to your targeted list of recipients. The messages can consist of text, HTML, or rich media. The trick is to avoid making your direct email marketing messages look like spam. To do this you can use email segmentation to make sure the message is appropriate for the group of recipients. Direct email marketing also normally uses personalisation so the recipient is addressed as an individual.

Why Is Email Marketing Important?

There are all sorts of reasons why email marketing is increasingly important, the main one being that the world is increasingly mobile, and as people are constantly checking their mobile devices, you have a readymade way to present your marketing message to them repeatedly.

Email marketing can be more efficient than social media marketing and organic search for customer acquisition and improving sales, and it remains more cost effective than either. For small businesses, it’s certainly a better choice than traditional channels such as TV, radio or direct mail, all of which have a degree of built-in wastefulness. Email generates the highest ROI for marketers, as has none of the costs associated with printing, postage and so on, while still delivering the same promotional messages and images and leading to more reliable conversions.

But email marketing solutions have the additional benefit that once a user has signed up to your mailing list, you can improve the relationship with follow-ups. It’s a win-win situation in which you get both improved ROI and higher response rates. Furthermore, if you consult email marketing services about the best way to handle your lists, you can get advice on aspect such as creating segmented lists.

Because email segmentation allows you to divide your audience into email lists, it’s also possible to tailor messages for different groups. This not only allows you to appeal to different audiences, it also means you can A/B test email campaigns, sending different messages or details of different promotions to different groups and measuring the responses. Email segmentation is one of the most efficient ways of improving open rate.

You can also address your customers individually by name, and according to research from Campaign Monitor, emails with subject lines including the recipient’s name are 26 percent more likely to be opened.

Another reason email marketing is important is that people are already used to the idea of having to respond to an email, so whether it’s to click through to your website, sign up for a list, respond to an offer or just go ahead and buy, email invites them to start a transaction which will benefit your business.

And because it’s easy to get a measure of how your email campaigns are performing, you can make constant adjustments to improve your effectiveness without any additional cost.

Five Benefits Of Email Marketing

Email marketing has many benefits, but to suggest just the top five:

1. Instant Impact

Whether you want your message to get out to 10 people or 10 million, email arrives instantly, and because it can be scheduled, you can get it to your customers’ mailbox at just the right time of day, and with a strong CTS in your message you can get an immediate response

2. Easy To Measure

The effectiveness of email marketing can be measured by its open rate, bounce rate and response rate; software tools to do this also make it easy to segment your mailing list so you can A/B test the effectiveness of different campaigns

3. Reach An Already Engaged Audience

Because users have to sign up to get on your mailing list, you know when you message them that they are interested in your company or products, and that you are not wasting time on poor prospects. Using list segmentation you can appeal to more clearly defined groups, and by giving users the option to unsubscribe from your list if they are no longer interested, you can get poor prospects to weed themselves out

4. Low Costs

Without the costs associated with radio, TV, print, direct mail, or paid-for online marketing, email marketing solutions prove themselves over and over again to offer the best ROI of any form of marketing

5. Build Strong Customer Relationships

Because e-mail can be personalised, it can be used to build a sense of trust with your customers, and to react to their concerns and enquiries

How To Set Up a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Although it is possible to set up an email marketing campaign yourself, to make it really effective and to make use of all the data analytics tools available you may need the help of an email marketing agency. Email marketing services don’t end with compiling a mailing list; testing and refining that list and making it work for your overall marketing goals can be time-consuming, and might be best left in the hands of experts from an email marketing agency.

Here are the some email marketing tips for setting up and running a successful email marketing campaign.

1. Define Your Audience

The first task in setting up an email marketing campaign is to define your audience. No-one appreciates unwanted spam in their inbox, and no marketer wants to waste time pitching to people who aren’t interested in his products. So your first task is to decide who you want on your list. For instance, if you run a local business, you probably only want local people; if you sell women’s clothes, you probably only want women. If you run a toy shop, you may think you want to target kids – but it’s more likely you will want to reach their parents or grandparents, the ones who actually spend the money.

2. Build a Successful Email List

When you’re starting from zero, building an email list can be a daunting task. One solution is to buy one, but increasingly any decent email marketing agency would tell you that this is regarded as a bad idea – the quality and accuracy of the list is unlikely to be high, with a percentage of outdated or inaccurate addresses, your mailings are likely to be regarded as spam, you risk issues of legality, and email service providers may refuse to serve your lists.

So how do you start building your own list? The best way is through your website and social media. Use opt-in forms on your homepage, target your audience through Facebook, and collect email addresses at trade shows and public events. We’ll also talk later about the uses of a lead magnet. These processes will take longer than buying a list, but it will work out better in the end.

3. Create Segments and Groups

Mailchimp reports that segmented email campaigns had open rates that were 14.37 percent  higher, clicks that were 64.78 percent higher, and 8.98 percent lower unsubscribe rates than non-segmented campaigns by the same users.

Having made sure that your email  service provider allows you to segment your lists, there are many ways to do it – by demographics, purchase history, open rates, type of purchase, amount of purchase, job title and so on. If you want to segment your lists from the word go, you’ll need a software tool with page-level targeting, such as Optin Monster, so you can create targeted email opt-in forms for specific visitors to your website visitors. Finally, you have to create ‘lead magnets’ to allow your website visitors to identify themselves as belonging to one of your defined segments.

4. Select The Right Campaign

Before you start firing off random emails, you need a good idea of the form of your campaign. You should ask yourself what is your current situation, where do you want to be, and what do you need to get there; well-known forms of internal and external analysis use the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) or PESTEL (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, Legal) models to develop new marketing ideas. Look closely at your current email marketing campaigns, analysing key metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate and return on investment. Not until you have done that should you start creating content for your email marketing campaign.

5. Decide What Content To Write

Writing your email marketing copy can be the hardest part of the process. A whole book could be devoted to the art, but here are some content email marketing tips:

• Keep your copy short. No-one wants to read a long essay in an e-mail.
• Get a hook in early, but don’t pitch your offer straight away.
• Address your subscribers by name.
• Make it personal. A human interest story helps you make an emotional connection with your customers.
• Offer something valuable. A piece of content, a resource or an offer
• Hook them with a poll, survey, image or video.
• Make sure your call to action (CTA) is included several times, ideally at the beginning, in the middle and at the end.
• Consider design. Make your emails look good and remember to make them readable on mobile devices.

6. Establish Your Goals

Like all other forms of marketing, email marketing isn’t an end in itself, it must have a set goal. Because email marketing is a particularly measurable form, it’s relatively easy to set goals and check whether they have been reached. For instance, you may simply want to increase the numbers of subscribers on your email list – in which case your email software can tell you if you have hit your target. More likely, you want to improve your open rate, your click-through rate or your conversion rate – or a combination of two or more of these. Whatever your email marketing goals, they should be dependent on your overall marketing strategy and your brand aims.

7. Create a Schedule

Before going live with your email marketing campaign, your last task is to set a schedule. Email marketing is particularly easy to schedule because the process can be almost entirely automated.

It’s important to schedule your emails marketing campaigns because:

• You may want to run several campaigns at once without them clashing
• Scheduling helps to avoid human errors
• There will be an ideal time to send emails to your customers, but it won’t necessarily be in your working hours
• You can prepare for special events such as Christmas, New Year, Cyber Monday or Black Friday well in advance, and you can schedule emails to your customers on their birthdays or on important anniversaries

Don’t forget that another advantage of e-mail marketing is that it allows you to set up ‘autoresponders’ which mean that your customers always get an answer the moment they send you a message. Autoresponders can also be set to send follow-ups at preset time intervals. Autoresponders are normally divided into two categories – the outsourced ASP model which operate on the provider’s infrastructure, configured via a web-based control panel, and are paid for by a monthly usage fee – and server side autoresponders which reside on the user’s own server, but which require technical skills to install.

It’s important to understand that while it’s a legal requirement that users should have to opt-in before you add them to your email marketing lists, you are also legally required to give them the option to opt-out, or unsubscribe. Users choose to opt-out for a number of reasons – they subscribed accidentally in the first place, their interests have changed, or perhaps they feel you are sending them too much e-mail – but whatever the reason you must make it easy for them to opt-out.

There are of course ways to reduce your opt-out rate, such as list segmentation, allowing users to set their preferred e-mail frequency, and offering alternative communications channels such as SMA or social media.

Legally, all forms of electronic communication containing your company’s details are defined as EDM marketing (Electronic Direct Marketing), and must conform to local laws. Emails, PDF brochures, infographics, promotional information, games, coupons, and practically anything else you can send by email can be defined as EDM marketing, and can only be sent if the receiver has voluntarily agreed to it in advance.

So if you see the term EDM marketing being used, be aware that it can refer to more than just email marketing; but it will certainly be a method used to build customer relationships, generate leads, and increase sales.

What is a Lead Magnet?

One of the most vital elements of building your email subscribers list is the lead magnet – not something you include in an email itself, rather a lead generation technique for building your email list in the first place, and then expanding it. Good examples of a lead magnet include getting customers to sign up to download a PDF leaflet, white paper or infographic.

A lead magnet is effectively an incentive for someone to sign up to your email list. The more attractive the incentive, the more likely you are to get people signing up. For instance, rather than just inviting people to sign up for your mailing list for news, you can offer them a downloadable PDF case study or market analysis which will make them feel they are getting something in return for signing up.

So what is a good way to put together a lead magnet, and what types are most likely to work for you?

How To Create a Lead Magnet That Works

In creating a lead magnet it’s important to understand what appeals to your email subscribers. I general a led magnet will work best if it offers some instant result for users, and demonstrates your unique value proposition in the market.

Your lead magnet should be short and specific rather than long and general it must be possible to digest quickly and must give a quick result. First identify what your customers need, then work out how to give it to them immediately.

Here are some good ideas for the contents of a lead magnet:

• A recipe. If you are in the food business, it’s surprising how appealing a recipe can be to your customers.
• A ‘cheat sheet’ or checklist. A simple step-by-step list which makes some process easier to navigate – perhaps a can maintenance job or a DIY technique
• A report – a collection of data or statistics relevant to your industry
• A webinar – a live internet lecture always has a high perceived value. Later you can offer a video or audio version based on the webinar.
• A quiz. Always popular and easy to put together using tools like Qzzr.
• A survey. Both gives you valuable market research material, and acts as an inducement for people to sign up to your mailing list.
• Free catalogues. For people on the bottom of your ‘sales funnel’, a free catalogue is a no-brainer.

All these and many more types of lead magnet can be used to induce people to sign up for your mailing list, and are among the very best ways to increase subscriptions to your mailing list at minimal cost.

What Is an Opt-in form?

When you are compiling an email marketing list it’s essential to get consent to add people to the list of email subscribers. The ‘opt-in’ is a form of consent acknowledging interest in a product or service and authorising you as a third party to contact them with further information such as newsletters and brochures.

You can present an opt-in form in many ways – as a pop-up form, a dedicated page, or a button on a webpage – but according to the new GDPR regulations governing data protection in Europe, there are also ways you are not allowed to collect email data, such as presenting a pre-ticked form that assumes consent. The new regulation requires that brands collect affirmative consent that is “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous” to be compliant.

How To Create a Successful Opt-in Form

According to Marketo.com, 95 percent of visitors to your website are not ready to buy from it the first time – in fact it takes on average three to four visits for prospects to turn into sales. That’s why it’s essential to capture their email data and add it to your list by submitting an opt-in form.

There are a few key skills to creating a successful opt-in form. First, it has to be visually appealing – you may have as little as 15 seconds to grab the attention of your website visitor, so your form needs to stand out. Use directional design cues to point to the Call to Action button, and don’t forget to emphasise your lead magnet.

Keep the number of form fields to a minimum, concentrating on qualifying data, and validate fields once they are completed. Add help text to explain why each piece of information is being collected, and example ‘ghost text’ to show the format each form should be filled in.

Make sure your opt-in form is placed above the fold on the page, and make your CTA button stand out in colour.

If you have problems designing your opt-in form, WordPress plugins like OptinForms can help.

How Do You Create Email Marketing Content?

The main trick to writing email marketing content that will appeal to your email subscribers is to make it look like something your users want to read, not like unwanted spam. With that in mind there are a few email marketing tips to remember:

1. The subject line is crucial .

Nothing kills your email open rate quicker than a poor subject line. The trick is to make it short, compelling, direct, and different. Address the reader directly, include action words, and ideally include their name in the subject line. Keep the subject line related to the copy, and make sure it’s relevant to your reader and to your marketing aims.

2. Write in the second person.

The second person voice – for example ‘To make soup you need a large pot and a blender’ – works much better than first person, for instance ‘I make soup using a large pot and a blender’. The second person voice makes it clear that the message is aimed at the reader.

3. Keep your message short.

You will lose your readers’ interest if the message is too long, and there’s the risk that you will stray off-topic. Don’t send out an email just for the sake of it – make sure you have a good reason otherwise it may be regarded as spam and you risk readers unsubscribing.

4. Explain the benefits of your product.

Rather than listing its features, explain the benefits first. This makes it easier for your readers to understand why it is unique and special – once they understand this, then they will be interested in reading about the features.

5. Don’t be afraid to display your personality.

You can differentiate yourself from your competitors by showing personality in your marketing emails. Keep it professional, but don’t hold back from showing why you are different.

How Do You Create an Effective Promotional Email?

An effective promotional email is one that readers receive, open, read, respond to the CTA, and which eventually converts into a sale. But how can you guarantee all these steps?

We’ve dealt with the importance of compiling an effective mailing list and of segmenting it. So let’s assume your message has got to the people you want it to. Now how do get them to open it? The first barrier may not be the subject line – it may be your email address. If your sender name is unclear or looks spammy, according to Convince & Convert, up to 43 percent of recipients may delete it immediately. So make sure your sender address is your company name, or maybe that and your own name.

The next barrier to opening is the subject line. We’ve discussed some ways to optimise this; try to keep it between six and 10 words (particularly important for mobile devices where the whole subject line may not be visible); personalise it; and avoid spammy phrases such as ‘Savings’, ‘Clearance”, “Deals” or “Exclusive”. These may be filtered out by ISP and so may never make it to your recipient’s inbox.

Keep your copy short and compelling, and edit it ruthlessly – once you’re written it, go through it carefully and eliminate anything unnecessary.

Above all try to make your content sell without being too salesy; Enchanting Marketing says “Dirty sales tactics are designed for selling to strangers. Treat your buyers like friends. Be genuine. Be helpful. Be lovable. Make their life better.”

Another form of email marketing is ‘drip marketing’. Drip marketing is a communication strategy that sends, or “drips,” a pre-written set of messages to customers or prospects over time. Though drip marketing principles can also be applied to social media, normally the medium used is email. In email drip marketing, the messages are automated and timed according to specific behaviours of the recipient. Email drip marketing is often used in conjunction with a webform to create an autoresponder.

What Is An Email Marketing Software?

Email marketing software solutions such as Mailchimp help you to plan and execute and email marketing campaign, the monitor its results and modify the campaign accordingly. Though some have free trials, most work on a paid subscription basis. Ask some email marketing services which they think would work best for your business.

Email marketing software functions can include email building, scheduling, automation, reporting and analytics. Email marketing software will automate the exhausting manual processes of list preparation, creation of segregated subgroups, sending the actual emails, and creating feedback reports.

One of the most valuable functions of email marketing software is that it helps you to split-test campaigns, sending different versions to separate list groups and reporting (in real time I you need) on responses, maximising your return on investment.

Software will also analyse your click-through rate (CTR). Once you have got users to open your emails, the next worry is your CTR, the percentage who actually click on a link in your email, usually to go to your website. According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), email CTR is the most important email marketing metric for 70 percent of marketers, and the most popular way for them to measure the success of their email marketing campaigns.

Some of the various functions of email marketing software include WYSIWYG email builders, mailing list management tools, A/B testing tools, merge tagging (which lets you replace elements in your email with data from a list, for instance to insert your customer’s name in the message), autoresponders, which can be set to send targeted content to your mailing groups based on activity, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) integration, and social media integration.

For instance, Campaign Monitor is an effective e-mail marketing platform with functions including an e-mail builder, analytics including subscriber activity, and acquisition trend analysis. Campaign Monitor offers a range of price plans from $9 per month, depending on the number of users and messages per month you have. Campaign Monitor also has a premium option adding an email design consultant, online training and onboarding, and dedicated customer support, which includes priority phone and email. But, as they say, other email marketing platforms are available, so apart from Campaign Monitor what are some of the most popular email marketing software tools?

One of the most useful applications for software tools is in CRM email marketing. CRM email marketing integrates your marketing tools with your customer relationship management, so for instance you can query your contact database to quickly create targeted email campaigns to segmented groups. CRM email marketing also helps you to grow your contacts base through response form on your website.

10 Best Email Marketing Tools and Software

1. ActiveCampaign

An email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation, and CRM software platform for small-to-mid-sized businesses. ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation software with features for email marketing, lead scoring and web analytics, a CRM platform, and a live chat messaging platform called Conversations.

2. Constant Contact

A comprehensive suite of email marketing tools including a drag-and-drop editor, mobile-optimised templates, automatic welcome emails, subject line testing, and content segmentation based on clicks.

3. MailChimp

A popular marketing automation platform and email marketing service moving towards becoming a full marketing platform aimed at smaller organisations.

4. GetResponse

An email marketing and online campaign management platform for building targeted subscriber lists and sending newsletters, video emails, and follow-up campaigns. It offers marketing automation, responsive email design, email templates, a landing page creator, and useful statistical analysis tools.

5. SendInBlue

A web-based ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) solution for relationship marketing, featuring  email marketing, transactional email, marketing automation, customer-relationship management, landing pages, Facebook ads, retargeting ads, SMS marketing, and more.

6. ConvertKit

An automation marketing platform featuring advanced email marketing functionality, tag-based list segmentation, visual automation flows, opt-in forms and detailed reporting , aimed at the small business owner and digital creatives such as bloggers.

7. Hubspot

HubSpot provides tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics, landing pages, customer support and search engine optimization, and has integration features for salesforce.com, SugarCRM, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and others.

8. Ontraport

Offers customer relations management services that help with content management, such as creating and hosting webpages; lead tracking, e-mail, SMS, social media, and direct mail; managing online payments, including automated billing; and workflow automation, such as for recruiting

9. Aweber

Comparable to Getresponse, a tool for hosting your mailing list, creating attractive email templates, sending e-newsletters out to subscribers and automating your communications to subscribers via ‘autoresponders’.

10. Drip

A CRM designed for e-commerce including custom opt-in pop-ups, automated lead magnet delivery, Facebook Lead Ads, visual emails, automated workflows, and personalization functions

TRON Media can help with all your email marketing requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in emal marketing, SEO, PPC, website design services, website security, social media marketing, WordPress, HTML coding, CMS, paid search marketing, Google Ads, content marketing and digital strategy, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build an email marketing campaign perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading email marketing agency in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to guarantee that email marketing works for you. Get in touch today to find out about our latest email marketing services, web design services, social media marketing services, and what an email marketing campaign can do for your brand awareness and ROI.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call Simon on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

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